Andrew Sullivan responded to my first letter in his blog yesterday. Here is how he begins:

“Thanks for taking the time to read the whole book. You’re not the first one to say it has the wrong title. Maybe I should have played off Sam Harris’ book and called it “The Beginning of Faith.” But when I tried to write about politics in these times, I simply found it impossible not to write about religion. Our foreign policy is shaped by a response to religious Islamic extremism; and our domestic politics, as you so ably demonstrate, has become about the use and abuse of religion for partisan poitical purposes.

I was struck in your book by many things that really are not about politics. Your account of your adolescence is honest, and very funny. Hormones are indeed a laugh riot, and I sometimes wonder whether God gave them to us to ensure that we remember to laugh at ourselves from time to time. But I was particularly struck by what you yourself describe as the moment of your epiphany: your brain tumor, your near-death experience when driving a car and blacking out. You may well have died if your wife had not seized the steering wheel.”

The rest of his post can be found at “The Daily Dish” or by just clicking here. I’ll respond this morning.